Phetjee Jaa at a Loss – My Experience of Seeing her Lose in Surin

full fight video: Phetjee Jaa vs Nong Praew in Surin (above)
Twenty minutes before Phetjee Jaa turned 13 years old, we were sitting together on a mat against the aluminum fence separating the schoolyard field from the “stadium” inside the fence that houses the ring in which we both just fought. We’re leaning with our backs against the fence and are huddled under blankets, although not the same one. I push Jai Dee, my maybe 10-month-old dog and who Jee Jaa loves, out from where he’s curled in my lap and over to Jee Jaa, so that he’s lying against the side of her body. He kind of blinks at being woken up, then tucks his nose under Jee Jaa’s arm and goes back to sleep. She strokes his head and says his name, which she pronounces all the time as if she’s chastising him, then removes her hand and goes back to her distant stare in the direction of the ring but not at what’s going on in it. I’m checking my watch every few minutes, counting down to midnight when I can wish her a Happy Birthday. But Jee Jaa is sullen. She just lost her fight, probably her first loss in years and out of over 160 fights likely one of only a handful of losses ever. What do you say in such a situation?

Part of me just wants to tell her it’s okay, but it feels so asinine. It’s also hard to locate her emotions; she’s clearly upset and embarrassed, but is it the normal feelings of losing a fight, something she’s not well-practiced in? Any time Jee Jaa fights her name is announced a dozen times throughout the program leading up to the fight. She’s a celebrity. Her older brother, Mawin, is intruded as “Phetjee Jaa’s brother” when he enters the ring. Her reputation precedes her. It’s a lot of pressure for her to perform and, quite frankly, she always does. This opponent she just faced in the ring was bigger than I am, both heavier and taller, and was clearly both experienced and skilled. Jee Jaa trains with me every day but she’s never had a fight against someone so much bigger – probably 12 kg (26 lbs) difference between them. I give her a hard time in the clinch now because my skills have advanced enough that my size becomes immovable. It’s the same obstacle in this fight for Phetjee Jaa. As was watching her fight this fight, I can see it’s the same frustration that I feel off of her sometimes when we’re training. And as I’m sitting there at the lip of the ring, seated next to a tiny girl who as a fan took a photo with Jee Jaa, at a certain point in the fight I can see Jee Jaa give in. She doesn’t give up, but she gives in to the impossibility. The little girl next to me had in the 3rd round been arguing with a little boy who is equally tiny and maybe even younger; he’s got a small voice. Their high-pitched baby words had gone back and forth as the little girl fan insisted that the fight is only 3 rounds (it’s not; it’s 5 rounds) and after the fourth round, when the crowd goes silent as it becomes clear this fight is mathematically over, points-wise, the little boy says through the silence Phetjee Jaa paaaeeee, extending the word for “to lose.” He’s stating what we all know already, that she’s lost this fight unless something miraculous happens, but he’s saying it out of a child’s understanding of the disbelief of the loss itself, not in relation to the fight at all – he doesn’t see how or why she’s losing. He just knows that she is and that we’re all uncomfortable.

There’s nothing Jee Jaa could have done. Nine times out of ten she loses that fight. The opponent was just too big and too skilled, the combination of the two making it impossible. And Jee Jaa fought hard, even when she’d given in to the impossibility of a win, she was beautiful. I’ve seen her do this in training. I’ve seen her “check out” mentally because her dad is being micro-critical or because she’s frustrated. She can bang out 5 beautiful rounds on the pads or an hour-straight of clinch while sniffing through tears. And if you had the sound off, so to speak, you’d have no idea she was crying. If you didn’t know her or if you didn’t pay attention closely, you’d have no notion she was even upset. She just works through it. And part of this is that she’s been a “show fighter” for years now. Mawin and Jee Jaa will earn a little money doing demonstration fights at the bars in Pattaya. In fact, a video of one of these show fights has been circulating on Facebook for over a year now with the majority of the commenters having no clue at all that it’s not a real fight. This is to say that Jee Jaa knows how to perform, how to “act” within the movements of a fight. When I was watching her in the ring, I saw her change. Her opponent actually fouled by “breaking the back” in a clinch move, bending Jee Jaa backwards and dropping her onto the mat. The ref didn’t call it as a foul and it happened one more time in the opposite corner. This was the end – this is when Jee Jaa’s face fell. I’ve done this to her in training. It’s a fine-line between what’s allowed, what’s tolerated and what’s a foul with this move. In training, it’s something I resort to when I have few other options and nearly every time it pisses Jee Jaa off; it can break her in training, when we’re all tired and emotionally volatile. Perhaps, even, the frustration she’s trained with me by responding to this move at her home ring was primed for it to come out in this fight – she’d practiced being cracked by it, emotionally, for months with me in the ring. And maybe because I’d seen it so many times before I was able to see it now. I’m not sure that anyone else in the crowd saw it. After the fight, when I pointed out this moment to her father as a) a foul, and b) the moment that changed the fight, it was as if he didn’t see it the way I did; but he immediately started repeating it to others as the reason the fight was lost. It helps that it was a foul. But the fight was impossible to begin with.

When we’d first arrived at the venue it was still empty. There were a few vendors on this inside of the fence but that was pretty much it. Maybe 30 minutes after we sat down on our mats I was introduced to my opponent; 10 or so minutes after that Jee Jaa was brought over to the other side of the ring, where a small group of gamblers who had accumulated over the time we’d been there without me realizing it had assembled, and stood shoulder to shoulder with her opponent. There was already a 50,000 Baht “side bet” on the fight. Meaning each side puts up half the money and the winner takes all. The opponent was bigger than the promoter had said. He’d claimed she was 47 kg – my actual size – and had been truthful about her height being pretty tall. He’d also, according to Sangwean, claimed she didn’t know how to clinch well. But standing there next to each other, it was pretty obvious that the size difference was greater than anticipated. This girl was probably 50-51 kg; she was the size of the opponents I face pretty regularly. I didn’t see them standing together as it was on the other side of the ring and I didn’t go over to watch. But when Jee Jaa came back she looked confident. She was smiling and at ease, almost as though her “game face” had relaxed away. She is very serious in the car and the hours leading up to fights; that seemed to dissipate after she’d seen her opponent. I thought that was strange, given that she was bigger than promised. But I was happy to see it because Jee Jaa looked relaxed. In the time between the shoulder to shoulder comparison and actually getting into the ring, the “side bet” doubled – 100,000 Baht to the winner (according to Sangwean).

When it became evident that Jee Jaa was not going to win this fight, in round 4 when it was obvious that it was “knock out or nothing” and the KO was certainly not looking likely, she kept glancing at her corner. Her lip was trembling and she kept biting it; she was pretty close to crying right there in the ring, which I’ve actually seen her opponents do. I’ve seen her train through tears, so I wasn’t too concerned with it. It was just intense to see her like this in a fight because usually she’s smashing her opponent with relative ease. The fights I’ve seen where she’s fighting bigger, less-experienced girls were unsatisfying; Jee Jaa just isn’t challenged in them. But I saw her fight a boy at her own size, a very skilled fighter from Samart’s gym and incidentally it was the kid she was supposed to fight on TV the year before when the announcement was made – in the ring – that she was no longer permitted to fight boys. Her fight against that boy was dominant, she won decisively, but it was a good fight. I saw her get whacked and she actually got a little pissed off and just went into another gear. She hasn’t had to do that in the fights against bigger girls I’ve seen her fight since. Against this much bigger opponent now she kept going, she kept performing just as she does in training when she’s struggling emotionally, but she kept looking at her corner to see what they wanted her to do. At this point she got permission from her father to just ride it out. This happens in fights, in the fifth round, when one fighter is far ahead and there’s not much other than a miracle that can turn the tables – the fighters will “dance it off.” They keep moving around but don’t really fight anymore; they stay at a close distance and just kind of hop around to burn time in the round. It’s concession on the part of the fighter who has lost and it’s kind of polite mercy on the part of the fighter who is winning. No need to do unnecessary damage to either bodies or ego, I guess. Seeing Sangwean give her permission to concede, I was surprised. But not because of the permission, because he was so calm in doing so. He screams at me and Mawin in the corner. It’s actually very socially uncouth to do this, but part of me believes that he takes the risk of appearing so jai rohn (“hot hearted” and emotionally volatile) as a performance for the audience. Not entirely, when he’s yelling at me he’s fucking sincere about what he’s saying and he is definitely not happy with what I’m doing – but I also believe, and this is hard to say because it’s far more complicated than just this one statement, that the fights that Phetjee Jaa and Mawin fight are not always what they seem. Jee Jaa can “hustle” a little bit – she can make the first couple rounds look close and then tear off on her other levels and end the fight when the gamblers have already bought in to the illusion of a close match. Knowing that she is capable of and practiced in doing this, as well as all the practice Mawin has “losing” the show fights that they two of them do in the bars of Pattaya, I just wonder if somehow the risk was not as big as it appeared.

Phetjee Jaa climbed out of the ring and an envelop with the 100,000 Baht was handed to her opponent, who posed for a few photos and then climbed out herself. I had to duck under the ring to get out of my spot from where I filmed. The crowd was quiet and the gamblers all looked Jee Jaa in the face as she weaved between them – she did not return the looks. Her father and “Grandpa” silently removed her gloves and wraps. Mawin sat behind them wrapping his own hands; he’d be getting in the ring after only one more fight. I wanted to hug Jee Jaa, or put my hand on her shoulder or something. But that’s not a very Thai expression; it wouldn’t mean here what it means in my inclination to offer it. Instead I just start tending to her in small ways: wiping her face with a tissue, folding her clean shirt that she’ll change into. Once her wraps are off she wordlessly squats next to Mawin, who is now lying supine on the mats as Jee Jaa and Sangwean rub his limbs with oil. A drunk old man comes over and starts telling Jee Jaa she has to fight harder. He’s only saying three or four words but over and over again in this drunken insistence. Jee Jaa looks at him and looks away; her parents only look away and ignore him. This is also very Thai, to just ignore people who are acting outside of proper conduct. I want to stand up and say something because I’m not Thai and my instinct is to shut this guy up for talking to a kid like this, and I’ve been on the receiving end of drunk men muttering at me endlessly about what I should do in a fight before I go in the ring – I hate it. In Chiang Mai my friend Eh Paweena saved me once, politely telling the old man hounding me before a fight that I had to focus and he toddered off. In this case, with Phetjee Jaa feeling humiliated and this old goat braying at her, a kind man from a little distance away worked his way over and dragged the old man away to buy him a hot coffee at a nearby stall. That man was a good man.

Mawin goes into the ring and Jee Jaa doesn’t follow along with the family. This is unusual. She’s usually at ringside with her brother for his fights. I think she didn’t want to be subjected to the crowd again, but I don’t know. She pulls the blankets over herself and lies down with her back against the metal fence. She watches toward the ring, but I’m lying next to her and I know neither of us can see anything. I try to push Jai Dee on her and she doesn’t want the comfort. I monitor my wristwatch closely – I have no idea what to say to her about this loss – and as the digital face reads 00:00 for midnight, I hold my wrist out for her to see the time and I say, “Happy Birthday, Nin!” She looks at the watch and smiles, a real genuine smile, and asks me in Thai if it’s really her birthday. I nodded and said, sipsam pee laew (“13 years already”) and she grinned. It was sweet. Birthdays are not celebrated the same here and the whole “Oh my God, it’s midnight!” thing is not universal in the west either, but maybe she understood that I was excited about it. And I guess not knowing what to say is something I should get used to, because I remember being a 13-year-old girl and, quite often, there was nothing anyone could say. It’s not about comfort at that age. It’s just about understanding – quiet understanding is best. And this moment of testing out the waters with a much bigger opponent, just seeing where the limits are, and coming face-to-face with the disappointment of what already is with opponents that are too easy and the disappointment of what might be with opponents who are bigger and older and skilled… well that pretty much feels like 13, too.

Lying there next to Phetjee Jaa in the very cold night up in Surin after watching her lose and at the moment she turns thirteen years old, I felt very clearly what I’ve thought about her before. She is a concentrated, undulating core of possibility. I feel close to her.

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A 103 lb. (46 kg) female Muay Thai fighter. Originally I trained under Kumron Vaitayanon (Master K) and Kaensak sor. Ploenjit in New Jersey. I then moved to Thailand to train and fight full time in April of 2012, devoting myself to fighting 100 Thai fights, as well as blogging full time. Having surpassed 100 fights in 3 years here, my new goal is to fight an impossible 200 times in Thailand, as much as I possibly can, and to continue to write my experience.

1 Comment

BobbyW

August 27, 2016 9:02 pm

Thank you for sharing this. Excellent read. Have been watching Phetjee jaa for a long on youtube and did catch one fight in Chiang Mai. She has such heart and is a joy to watch I hope to catch her again next trip.

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First off, let me say it: weight, its not that big of a deal. There is a strong caveat to this, which is that it is a definite advantage, but so is height, or knowing the scoring system, or fighting since you were 10, or having a fight on your home turf, and so many other things. So while weight is always a potential advantage, it is just one among many possible advantages. You can beat people who have the weight advantage over you, just like you can with any of those other advantages. I know that in the West

read my guest post articles a Husband’s Point of View A Husband’s Point of View – Consider this a working theory. I’ve written about the uniqueness of Thai style training before, in The Slow Cook vs the Hack, and this article can be seen as something of an extension of that. But as Sylvie’s husband watching her progress through very earnest training and a hell of a lot of fighting, and seeing numerous westerners come through her Thai gyms, I’ve come upon something I think is pretty important. What led me to this is a very particular quality many serious

Below is meant to be a helpful guide, something that I wish I had when I first came to training Thailand. These are just things I’ve noticed in my 4 years of training and fighting here and are not hard and fast rules to follow. If you want to be polite in Thailand gyms, in a culture that is different than your own, these are just a few things to look for. There are of course a wide variety of gym experiences in Thailand, and things that are impolite in a small, family Thai-style gym might very well be common

A lot of us feel that aggression comes with an “on/off” switch, and that we should be able to flick it back and forth based on context. Many of us who are learning Muay Thai struggle with aggression, perhaps because we don’t feel that we are “naturally aggressive,” and it’s frustrating to watch those who are seemingly naturally gifted with aggression succeed in ways that we don’t see in ourselves. But aggression isn’t natural, even if it does seem innate in some more than others. I contend that aggression feels natural to some due to having spent years cultivating it before they

First a Little Bit About Daeng Daeng is one of the most fight-focused trainers I’ve trained with. When I was training at Lanna Muay Thai in Chiang Mai, it was Daeng who invested the most in diagnosing and fixing weaknesses in my fighting. He wasn’t my main trainer, but he’s a very good teacher and has a keen eye for finding how to improve on existing strengths and correct errors. I’d initially gotten a bit stuck with a technically brilliant but lazy and unmotivated trainer – that guy was a great trainer for some, just not for me – and Daeng

Join and Study my Muay Thai Library of Legends This is a full video of a private I took with Arjan Surat, Head Coach of the Thai National Team, and owner of the esteemed (but lesser known to the west) Dejrat Gym in Bangkok. I did a short review of the gym when I interviewed female fighter Kaitlin Young, and it was then that I met Arjan Surat for the first time: an absolutely extraordinary teacher and life-force of Muay Thai. The man is Old School-Old School, telling me that he’s been holding pads longer than I’ve been alive (he’s

The Gendered Experience

Feb- 2014 – Here are a few thoughts on the Muay Thai meme that grew out of a photo a follower made of me from my last fight on Yokkao 7, about the meaning of the meme, the nature of the Thai exclusion of women at certain rings like Lumpinee, and what it meant to me. Let me also say that this from my limited perspective as having lived and fought here in Thailand for nearly 2 years now. Farang notoriously don’t get the whole picture. But more of the picture is better than less, and this is what I

To begin, these are my observations as a female fighter in Thailand who has pursued learning clinch for 3+ years. Other female fighters may have had other experiences, but difference of experience does not mean that the theme of what I write about here is not true or relevant. It also does not mean that what other women experience, if different, is false – there is room in the world for a plurality of experiences. What I’m writing about here is not meant to scare anyone away from training in Thailand or pursuing clinch with the men in their gyms;

This is about the story that helps explain why Thais believe women should not enter (or even touch) the famed rings of Bangkok. There are actually two stories, one of which I had never heard and which may be an older version. Both stories are about how a female presence weakened the protective magic that surrounds the ring, and that is worn by male fighters, resulting in a night of bloody TKOs. It is part of the lore of modern Muay Thai, as traditional Thai beliefs have come in contact with contemporary views of womanhood. In the west the story

I received this communication some time ago and I was moved by the excitement and passion this woman gets from and puts into her Muay Thai. I asked her to write a bit more about how Muay Thai has affected her life and this is her beautiful response. (This writer has asked to remain anonymous and I think she speaks from a place a lot of us can appreciate): Dear Sylvie, I just wanted to mention I went to the TBA Nationals last year and took second in my division. I came down from 211 lbs to fight at 165

One of the more limiting things as a female Muay Thai fighter is that we have no real history, no archived past to attach ourselves to, to anchor our passion and propel us to greater achievements. We have the names and photos of western women with lots of belts, in recent times, and very few videos, but reach beyond a decade or so and the record of female Muay Thai just falls off into mist. And in terms of Thai female fighters, anything prior to 1998 is extremely obscure and subject to the dubious or incomplete aspects of oral accounts.

photo credit above: Paula Bronstein at Getty Images Guest Post – A Husband’s Point of View There’s been some of recent conversation about the bottom rope, and the Thai custom that women not only pass under the rope when entering the fight ring, but also less well-known, that in some more conservative camps, that they enter training rings this way as well, so as to not disturb the protective powers of magic that consecrate the ring and everything that happens within it. One western coach took to Facebook to present a defiant rant that his female fighters would never go

Some of the questions raised by this article were followed up here: Do Women have a Commitment Advantage in Muay Thai This post also lead to me writing about the Myth of Overtraining and how Endurance is a Skill. There’s a type of dude who frequently appears in the gym in Thailand, looking to fight in Muay Thai. Usually these guys already have a few fights under their belts and are in close-to-fighting-shape. I specify that they’re “close to” fighting shape because these guys rarely identify themselves as being already in shape, or where they would want to be to

Either Side of the Ropes Something happens when a woman steps into the ring. It’s not universal and I cannot speak for everybody, but I’ve both witnessed this phenomenon on many occasions in other women and I’ve experienced it myself. Women who are fantastic in training – padwork, bagwork, shadowboxing all with really sharp technique – seem to fall apart in sparring or in fights. I’ve seen men do the exact opposite, looking pretty sloppy and borderline bad in training and then suddenly get it together when within the ropes of the ring. What the hell is this? The most

The Inherent Nature of Thai Clinch This video was shot about 25-30 minutes into a clinching session at the tail end of afternoon training. Initially, everyone jumped in to help Big with his clinch because he has some fights coming up, but by the time we get to this video everyone is working with “Godzilla,” who is significantly bigger than all the other boys and Den. They’re doing a “round robin” type drill with “last man standing” rules, so that two men are clinching and whoever gets thrown is “out” and whoever is still standing is still in, so the

The responses to my latest article The Fragility of Western Masculinity has been very interesting and somewhat unexpected. It has been, already, my most widely read article, and surprisingly has been embraced by a lot of men, a group that I’d anticipated would take offense. There have been the usual “shut up! you don’t know what your [sic] talking about!” comments with more or less expletives to add flavor, but they’ve been largely drowned out by sincere male fighters who recognize something in both kinds of masculinity examined in the post and who want to push themselves for more. (I see

We pulled the car around a corner in a maze of suburban small streets and panned the lane in an attempt to locate the Dejrat Gym – this is an out-of-the-way gym which we could only find with GPS and a map location (below). At the far end of the street there was a pile of colorful equipment laid out in the driveway in order to dry it in the sun – a sure sign of a gym if I’ve ever seen one. So we park the car and I get out to greet the three older men who are

Part 1 – The Interview with Angie Above is my interview with Angie, a Kathoey (commonly called “Ladyboy”) who is about to have her first Muay Thai fight. Angie started training at Petchrungruang a few months ago. At first it was just once per week, on Sunday afternoons, which is a slow day at the gym. But she quickly got stronger – I could see it from afar, even before we really started interacting with each other, other than a smile of recognition back and forth – her passion for Muay Thai is evident. In a short amount of time,

Anniversary – 1 Year April 6th was the one year anniversary of our arrival in Thailand. It feels quite monumental, which is perhaps both strange and ordinary since I don’t really pay a great deal of attention to anniversaries (ordinary) but this one feels like it marks the accomplishment of both goals and dreams that seemed at a time unattainable (strange). What is most peculiar about the feelings I have surrounding this anniversary is how fast it seemed – it’s like the calendar is lying to me that it’s been a whole year and yet when I look at how